Cover

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

Introduction

The essays in this book are linked by two main themes: I investigate Jewish
intellectuals in tsarist and early Soviet Russia who attempted to fashion a
modern, secular, and nationally acute Jewish identity; and I study the contributions
to Russian culture by Jews who participated as absolute insiders.
Instead of repeating the conventional...

Part 1. Introduction

Scholars of Russian-Jewish literature have had some trouble defining it.
Any definition, however, would have to include elements such as whether the
author of a work was Jewish, who the audience was, and whether the content
reflected "Jewish concerns." However, the term "Jewish concern" is not at all
clear. Could antisemitic...

1. A Jewish Russifier in Despair: Lev Levanda's Polish Question

Lev Levanda (1835-88) is commonly regarded as a leading advocate of the
Russification of the Jews of the Russian empire, but in fact his ethnic attitudes
were far more complex and conflicting than this stereotype allows. One of the
sources of conflict were his ambivalent feelings about Poland and the Poles–a
people unwillingly...

2. Pacifism and Aggression in Shimon An-sky's Spiritual Evolution

The zigzag trajectory of Shimon An-sky's life has propelled scholars to view
him as plagued with paradoxes. One cause for this perception is his shifts in
ideology. Before 1905 he defended armed revolution, then turned to pacifism
and folklore studies, and then returned to support revolution. It can be
shown, however, that...

Shimon Frug, the Russian- and Yiddish-language poet and Jewish nationalist,
was apotheosized in his own time. But he was loved more for reasons having
to do with the specific needs of his contemporaries than for the aesthetic quality
of his poetry. Moreover, Frug's enormous reputation in his own time has
not carried over to the...

Because Jaffe attracted a group of Russia's most important poets and
writers, including Valery Bryusov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Aleksandr Kuprin,
and Maksim Gorky, these volumes have lasting importance for Russian literature.
Besides the luminaries of Russian culture already mentioned, Vladimir
Korolenko, Fyodor...

Vladimir Jabotinsky's novel Piatera (The Five; 1936) has bewildered the author's
biographers. And rightly so: no matter how much one tries to read the
novel through Zionist lenses it does not work. Shmuel Katz's 1,800-page
political biography has only one reference to the novel, and it does not even
appear in Katz's index...

Conceptualizing a Nation Apart: Politics and Historiography

Part 2. Introduction

This section deals with so-called "liberal nationalists," historians, and civic
activists, who strove to fashion a modern Jewish nation in the prerevolutionary
period and at the same time promoted the integration of Jews in Russia.
Ideologically they followed the lead of Simon Dubnov, who imagined a
Russia where Jews were...

Simon Dubnov's relations with Heinrich Graetz reflect a nexus of intersecting
tendencies of his life and thoughts in the key years when Dubnov was defining
his mission in life. On the most surface level, Graetz's death sparked a
strong emotional reaction, that of a student who finally decides to strive for
intellectual...

7. The Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia and the Evolution of the Petersburg Russian-Jewish Intelligentsia, 1893-1905

Established in 1863 by Baron Evzel Guenzburg and other wealthy Jewish
merchants who had recently been granted the right to reside permanently in
the capital, the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of
Russia (known as OPE, its Russian acronym) was the first-and for two
decades the only...

8. Henrik Sliozberg: A Mirror of Petersburg Jewry in Late Tsarist Days

In Russia in the second half of the 19th century there appeared a significant
group of Jews who, joining the Russian intellectual elite, began together with
Russians to offer a liberal political alternative to the tsarist government. Such
Jews lived primarily in St. Petersburg and worked as lawyers, doctors, engineers,
and...

9. Integration and Its Discontents: Mikhail Morgulis and the Ideology of Jewish Integration in Russia

Mikhail Morgulis (1837-1912), a Jewish civic leader, journalist, and lawyer in
Odessa, came of age in the 1860s, but lived until 19121-into the period dominated
by Jewish nationalism. Holding firm to a faith in Jewish integration, in
the last two decades of his life Morgulis shared the fate of many 1860s Jewish
intellectuals, such...

10. The Portrait of a Russian-Jewish Shtadlan: Jacob Teitel's Social Solution

Jacob (Yakov) Teitel (1851- 1939), a Jewish judge, criminal investigator, and
philanthropist, justifiably deserves the attention of historians of Russian
Jewry. His career serves as a mirror of changes in the legal and occupational
status of Jewish professionals in late-tsarist Russia. Entering the Ministry of
Justice in the 1870s, after...

Jews in the Russian Elite

Part 3. Introduction

This section deals with Russian Jews who became prominent contributing figures
in Russian culture itself, such as Lev Shestov (Shvartsman), the Russian Jewish
philosopher; Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon, the noted historian and
literary critic; and Aron Shteinberg, the philosopher and cultural observer.
These individuals...

The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 found the two friends, religious
philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev and historian and philosopher Mikhail Gershenzon,
on different sides of the conflict. Berdyaev's vehement opposition to
the revolution ostensibly caused him to break off relations with the sympathizer
Gershenzon. In...

12. Mikhail Gershenzon: A Jew in the Russian Elite

It was striking for his contemporaries that Gershenzon, a Jew, celebrated Russian
national culture with his enthusiastic essays on Russian intellectual history.
Indeed, Gershenzon was so well known as a sympathizer of conservative
Russian culture that many referred to him as a "Slavophile." Indeed, an
anecdote runs that...

13. The Tension of Athens and Jerusalem in the Philosophy of Lev Shestov

The reaction to Afiny
i Ierusalim (1938), Lev Shestov's final book, on which he
worked for at least ten years, is reflected by Bernard Martin, who observed in
his introduction to Shestov's philosophy: "The essays and aphorisms of Afiny
i Ierusalim represent, in many respects, the culmination of Shestov's entire lifetime
of intellectual...

The subject "Dostoevsky and the Jews" can be conceived in the broadest way
as touching on antisemitism in Russia from the middle of the 19th to the first
quarter of the 20th centuries. For the most part, the question has been formulated
as a conundrum: How could Jewish readers, such as Avram Kovner,
Leonid Tsypkin, Leonid...

15. Sticking it to the Tsar: Jacob Schiff, Herman Rosenthal, and the American Fight against Tsarist Persecution of Jews

After the Kishinev pogrom occurred on April 6-8, 1903, the Russian government tried to manage the international reaction by pretending that nothing
serious had happened The Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav Plehve,
apparently succeeded in convincing the U.S. Ambassador of his point of view.
In New York, by contrast...

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